Messages to the World

Today I have the feeling that I would like to dive into something new.  I spend the majority of my time either working, watching TV, or doing things outdoors.  During those times my mind of just full of thoughts.  Some are of anger, some are of happiness, and some are just devious.  Now, for those of you that know me I am far from artsy but that is not because I don’t want to be.  I think that I have made a decision to try to put my messages and thoughts onto paper.  Whether it be a story, a poem, or a picture.  I will delve into the world of art and see if I can find a medium upon which I can express my thoughts.  Wish me luck world.

For some reason this makes me think of Reba.  She used to draw and I was always jealous of this.  I don’t think that she knew that.

Its Been A While…

Dear Lazy Web and Friends,

It has really been some time since I have brought you the colorful snippets of my life.  Much has happened since my last post.  I have actually made progress on my Ph.D., I have traveled to South America.  To start with the simple, I went to Bolivia for two weeks in June.  This was a wonderful trip and I have  meet a lot of very cool people.  My mother has been going on these trips now for several years and I felt it was time to surprise her by joining in on the trip at the last minute.  Here is the cool part, she did not know I was coming till I “ran” into her at the Miami airport just minutes before the plane to La Paz Bolivia left.  I shall share with you the moment…

The trip was with done through a joint effort of the Project Helping Hands organization and the Cup Of Cold Water Ministries.  There are so many fantastic stories from this trip.  The trip motivation was to provide medical support for the small villages in the interior along the Mapiri river.  The trip was of mild ruggedness due to the ability to sleep in improved structures in different villages that we stayed in.  There was one evening where we slept along the river in the jungle.  Here I got the ability to us my hammock / tent from Hennessy Hammocks again, this time where it was intended, in a real jungle.  Of great concern for the trip was my eating habits.  If you have ever meet me you would know this has to be one of my most annoying features.  The prospect of eating strange fish / rice / not fried chicken… for days on end was quite frightening.  Well, I performed so much better than I thought I would.  I have discovered that I like Bolivian rice.  I have no idea how it is prepared, but it is good.  In addition to providing basic medical care to the villages free of charge we also installed two bio sand filters.  These are essentially 55 gallon plastic drums with a specific mixture of rocks and sand.  The fiter operates by forming a layer of bio material near the top which is called the Schmutzdeke and allowing the unfiltered water to slowly pass though this layer where the bio organisms remove the harmful water contaminants.  In addition to this the water also flows though clean sand which has other filtering properties.  Outside of just being in the region which offers so many different things such as fresh right off the trees fruit (bananas, oranges, and grapefruit’s), beautiful views of the mountains, and a sense of relaxation that I have not felt for a while, there is adventure.  I walked in the jungle in the middle of the night and stood on an ant hill that was 10 feet in diameter.  I also had the opportunity to ride the original death road… on top of the bus!  What a ride and what a trip.  Those of you who were on this trip with me I will never forget the times that we had and I hope to keep in touch with all of you.  Now, just for the curious I have compiled a google maps overlay of the trip.  I generated it by hauling my GPS unit with me and keeping a track of the trip.  One of the problems in the general lack of spelling that I have.  Most things on this overlay are mis-spelled but I have other things to do right now instead of fixing the spelling errors.  Just open this up in google earth and enjoy.  The colors denote the altitude where blue is the highest and red is the lowest.  For those that are interested you can check out my flickr collection of the trip a flickr.com.

This summer I have also gone back to Carroll Cave, visited the Lake of the Ozarks with friends, and made strawberry ice cream with liquide nitrogen

Yes, I have been making progress on my dissertation.  It is slow, but moving forward.  I will stop here.  So, a lot has happened, and a lot has yet to happen.  I have said too much…

Exit Stage Left…

Tweet Tweet….

To all that follow my blog! (ok all two of you )

I have added the tweet widget to the upper right side of my blog page.  So now when I tweet, which is more often than I blog, you can see what I tweet.  Now it is only limited to the last 5 tweets, so if you only come every now and then you will miss some things.  Anyway, back to work.

That KDE 4 Again

Peoples……

I must say that KDE 4 is just great.  It has definitely come a long way from where it started so long ago.  I have installed the SVN code as of March 17th (a day before my great spring break trip to CO).  The desktop is fluid and the plasmoids are actually working pretty solidly now.  Also missing are the plasma crashes.  So without further ado……  The screenshot….

In this shoot I have have a total of 6 desktop plasmoids running.  On the left I have the standard analug clock on top with a CPU meter on the bottom with the flickr plasmoid running in the middle.  On the right side of the screen I have from top to bottom the microblogging plasmoid setup for Twitter.com, the RememberTheMilk plasmoid, and then finally a folder view plasmoid to highlight common;y used documents.  I notice there are a few problems with some of the plasmoids.  For instance in the microblogging plasmoid when I make a post it shows up on the list but then even an hour later it still shows it as posted just a minute ago.  The RTM plasmoid crashes when I try to drag and drop the tasks between the priorities more than once, the first one works fine.  As far as the folder view plasmoid goes, it is just great.  The only problem here with this plasmoid is that I do not know how to adjust the grid parameters.  It seems that I should be able to put three icons there instead of two without it going to the next line down.  In addition to that I think that it would be great if you could have totally flexable zoom in that plasmoid.

Now one other thing that I would like to see is some sort of layout tool for the desktop with respect to the plasmoids.  For instance.  On the left I would like to be able to align the three plasmoids by their centers and then even group them so that when I move them around the center align stays the same.  You could set that up so many different ways.  I think that it would be cool.  I think that I should submit that as a wish in the bug database.

So, if yo have not not moved to KDE4, and I know that you are out there….  Just do it!  You will really thank yourself in the end.  Anyway, back to my work….

Good Apple — Bad Sticker

Today I was at work, well just now, and I decided to be the healthy person that I am (ahhhem) and eat an apple.  A few days ago I had done some grocery shopping in anticipation of this desire.  The fact that I did my grocery shopping 200 miles away from my destination is worth a whole other post.  So I start to do the standard pull the sticker off the apple so you do not consume things designed for a printer and I discovered, to my horror, that this was a precut sticker.  If you try to pull it off then it starts to rip.  This is not a sticker designed for a passport!  Ohh well.  I will now have to take the next several minutes dislodging this sticker from the apple before I can enjoy.  I thought I would share it with you.  Now for all you non believers out there (you know who you are) I have taken a picture and mocked it up with lines to represent the cuts in the sticker.  Too bad the sticker is fuzzy in the image.

I am actually not sure if I even feel like eating the apple anymore.

Its been a while

Dear LazyWeb,

A lot of things have happened since my last posting, which regrettably was too far back.  I have now gone back to Fermilab for about a month to work here at the D0 experiment.  I have started to dabble in the world of online dating.  I have decided to play with www.plentyoffish.com, my profile is here, mainly due to the fact that it is free and I think the other sites out there are just money hungry.  I must say that I am in general disappointed with the online women.  They say that they are looking for this great guy, which I think that I am, and yet I get no response, or even worse, read and then deleted.  Some women state they are looking to just hang out or looking for friends, but when I message them they seem not to respond.  It really makes you start to wander if you were not all that great.  Now, I am not giving up, I think that I am just venting.  It seems ironic that the reason I am posting here to the blog is because somebody very important to me told me that she misses reading my blog and for me to continue but this is the only topic on my mind right now.  Seems like the last thing that I would write about.  (as a side note the new interface for wordpress is quite nice, a definite upgrade)

Apart from my dating woe’s I have a new interest, reading philosophy…  Now if only I could find one to read.  I did some looking and I think that I am going to start with David Hume, unless a luck commenter has a better author for me.  I am not sure where this interest came from but we will see where it goes.  I have been doing some caving (not as much as I should) and I have also been playing with my new snowboard.  Since I am here near Chicago I plan to go up to Wisconsin to do some boarding in preparation for the spring break trip to CO this year.  Hopefully I will be able to find some friends here to go with me.  Ok, enough for now.  Mabey that I have posted here now I will get back to it again later this week. (lets keep our fingers crossed)

Justace

Regular Expressions

From time to time I just really fall in love with Unix (well, Linux for you purists)…  In windows it can be very difficult to get a quantity.  A click here, a click there, install update, reboot…  Then well at least 5 more clicks.  Well, Unix to the rescue.  The power comes from the ability to combine several different small programs in ways that the original programmer had not even thought of to get a result.  Case in point…

egrep ‘.*(nan|bweight.*[^.]).*’ analysis_trigger_nocuts.out | egrep -v ‘[.]‘ | uniq -c | awk ‘{ print $1; }’ | grep 2 | wc -l

Here I needed to know how many events in my analysis had returned two “nan”’s (one for each jet).  I will not go into detail about what the above line really does, I just dont have time for that right now, but sufice it to say the answer is 484.  Add that to the number of events that gave me a zero weight for my btagging and then you have 1794…  The total number of nan lines in my output.  So, everything adds up.  That is nice.  The point is this…  The power of unix comes not from huge programs that try to do everything, but from a combination of seemingly small programs that do small tasks well.  Seems like almost anything can be done with combinations if grep, egrep, awk, sed, wc, uniq, sort, and cut…

Dear World….

Today I have been though a gauntlent of dissapointment.  I have received a email from my advisor last week telling me that she wants me to be on my own more and to start looking for a job.  Now, this is a good thing since that means that she is starting to think that I am getting ready for the “real world”.  I have been trying to get stuff to her for the past week and a half and nothing is working correctly.  When I submit jobs to the batch queue’s to get results they just crash.  And on top of that I can not seem to get the corretions into my Monte Carlo all the way due to these batch issues.  Ok, so besides some other dissapointing news I thought that I had this batch issue solved where I come in this morning and find out that I had submitted with the wrong config file last night.  Worthless computing time wasted.  Now I have to resubmit but the computers at the experiment are being upgraded so the batch queue’s are offline.  Now to supliment this…  I have been needing to get some code together to make a plot for my work.  I have been putting it off since it was a hastle.  The other day I finally got around to getting this code written and it was awsome.  It did everything I needed it to, had cross-checks in the code, and the plot was great looking.  Today in an effort to back it up I accedentally removed it!  Now I must start over from scratch.  Now I know that it was only about 400 lines of code but…  Now on top of all this I need to be editing a paper.  I have been trying to get to it but things keep getting in my way.  For one I can not update the efficencies untill I have the corrections in the Monte Carlo (which I am waiting on batch jobs to be available again since they are required to get this to work.)

I dunno World…  Guess I just needed somebody to rant to.  Now to settle down and recover from my morning…  Possibly a trip downtown would help me to recover…

Quarter thiefs…..

Ok, as young growing adults out of the home we have from time to time the lovable task of doing laundry.  Now, I know that there are some that find this to be a fun and exciting task (you are all weird), for me it really is the last thing that I want to be doing.  My post here is not really about the act of doing laundry, but what one has to go though to get it done….  Putting quarters in a machine.  In this day and age it is really rare for me to carry cash, and an even less probability that I will be walking around with the eleven quarters it takes to wash and dry a load of laundry at my apartment complex.  Now, I really am not bent out of shape about the money it is just that I have to have quarters.  Can the companies just not get with the times.  I would be totally cool with switching to laundry tokens and have a token exchanger avail so that I could put 1/5/10 dollar bills into to get the tokens.  Or even better just swipe my credit card and have it issue me x number of tokens.  Really.  This definitely falls into the category of rant.  Lets get on the ball Mr laundry machine coin thief decider person.   (Ok, I think that is out of my system now P-) )…

Taco Hell….. (ohh, I ment Bell)

Today, I will write to you the reader with a new drive, a rejuvenation of desire to spread the silly things that happen to me on a daily basis.  To who do I owe this burst of energy to…  Stacie, the always bubbly and always fun to talk to girl that you wish you had more time with.  So many things have happened since my last posting.  Obviously too many to really talk about.  Now, just in case you thought this post was going nowhere…(and quickly)…  I will turn this around and set the stage at Lawrence’s premier late night restaurant, Taco Hell…  After I had met with some friends for the evening I decided to make a stop at the Taco Bell to grab some late night grub.  If you thought that your evening was entertaining before your stopped at the border, then you have a whole new surprise coming your way.  I have found that sitting in the drive though lane in a college town at 2:00 am in the morning always has its moment where you think to yourself, “Why would he do that…” or more common “What an idiot…”  So, after about 5 minutes in line a very large black pickup truck decided it was time to get out of there and proceeded to drive around the other cars to leave.  What the driver failed to do was realize that truck was not going to fit around all the cars and of course clipped the front end of the car making the order at the super wicked cool display that always shows what you ordered, but not necessarily what you will get.  The person making the order immediately got out of his car to confront the other driver, in a non-aggressive fashion of course, and was welcomed with a driver side window being rolled up as fast as possible.  This is where things started to get a little out of hand.  The guy opens the driver side truck door in an effort to further confront the driver.  I mean wow…  To just open the door of the other vehicle.  I could have sworn that there was going to be a confrontation ending in some form of bloodshed.  Well, at this point the ruck driver pulled away and left nothing behind but an aggravated and taken advantage of soul.

Now being the person that I am, I try to place myself in the other person’s shoes (usually cause they have better shoes, seriously, I need to glue the toe on my Vans back before it gets even worse).  When I do this I normally see some sort of justification for the action, but not this time.  I will go ahead a make the guess that the driver of the truck (who was female) was probably drunk and just could not handle a confrontation with the police, hence the hit and run.  I really hope that somebody got the plate of the truck.  It really sucks when your car is damaged and there is no way to get it fixed (this happened to me years ago in the University of Kansas parking lot).  Well, Mr Angry Damaged Car still kicking tires person, I feel for you.  I wish that I could do more to help but I think this is decidedly out of my hands.  If you were that driver, and you end up reading this post then let me know and I will buy you a drink.

Ok, so what can we all take away from this tale…  When bored and it is 2:00 am, just make a run for the border, there is always drama to be seen in the drive though….   (and yes one night I did see somebody get out of one vehicle in line, walk to another on in line and then piss on the tire.  Again, could have swore that was going to end up with blood there somewhere)…